I've been meaning to write up my thoughts on this sci fi work for a couple of weeks; a book that kept me happily entertained as I sat reading it in a pub with a couple of excellent pints of Reverend James.
The work, although like so much I read seeming to owe a little or lot to Banks' Culture novels - the "Gods in the Machine" characters seem to bear a resemblance to Culture sublimed races perhaps, and the grossly inhuman yet fully sentient and realised alien species reminded me of the fauna found in Banks - throws in Steampunk and retrotech elements to create a universe very much of its own devising.
The main thrust of the novel is the effect, 200 years in the future, of a non-incorporeal seemingly vastly superior race called The Festival on a planet where a sort of Tsarist elite rule over the peasant society. In return for entertaining anecdotes, the Festival offer the peasantry cornucopia technology that can create absoloutely anything, thus triggering an accelerated communist revolution that goes from village Soviets to a techono-overkill situation in a matter of days.
Meanwhile, the regime in charge of the planet, send out a battlefleet that although with a structure like that that fought in the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, is equipped with faster than light technology with the potential to affect the past. This attracts the interest of a number of parties, who send out agents to "monitor" these efforts...
I enjoyed the novel. It doesn't have the complexity or richness of a Culture novel, but is correspondingly more human and a lot easier to get into. Stross is also exploring our contemporary issues in this work, like freedom of information, the problems and benefits of high techonlogy, and the nature of tyranny, benign or otherwise. There is a follow up I'd like to read, and I would recommend the book to the fan of intelligent sci fi. Especially in the pub with a beer!
Copyright Bloody Mulberry 09/06/13
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